When I kicked off Mac Secrets, the first thing I looked at was "a better way to build OS X preferences." In this installment, I'll be looking at various undocumented aspects of PreferencePanes.framework that happen to be a documented framework.
Moreover, the stuff I'm looking at has got nothing to do with preference panes! …

This is fantastic

Wow, this article has got me really interested in creating an application to listen for some custom hot keys and trigger a process. I am going to look into this more closely. Thanks for this, Joseph. I look forward to your next article.

Make it Pretty Function?

I find making things look cool on my Mac takes quite a while, so a hotkey for making things look cool would really speed up my workflow, and give me more time to hang out on my Segway listening to my slick Michelle Shocked, REM, Alanis Morrissette & k.d. lang mashup on my iPhone, while wearing black & drinking Himilayan springwater personally blessed by the Dalai Lama.

Where is the 'make it look cool' function, and what are the arguments it uses?

I took a guess it must be somthing like 000000 | FFFFFF, I mean who uses colour? How 80's.

I want to put my 'Make it Cool' function on every key on the keyboard.

Oh, and I also want it to be intelligent enough to tell the difference between when I want to make things cool, or start iTunes to produce another thumping mashup.

This should be easy right, the cool Apple purchase facilitation executive told me Macs can do anything, and all this would be easy. They aslo told me that the Saturn Vs were designed with Macs, and George Orwell wrote "1983" on a Mac too; amazing what Microsoft try to get away with?

Web site wobbles.....

I should just mention that some of the printable characters used in this article didn't quite come out right on the website. So, whenever you see a reference to "_F5", this should really be cloverleaf - F5 where the cloverleaf is the familiar Cmd key symbol. I'm sure ya' know what I mean! ;-)